FRANKLIN MacARTHUR is a man driven by loyalty and the guilt he feels over the death of his friends.

For the past 4 ½ years, MacArthur has been hellbent on getting this city, and this country, to recognize the name of Marine Pvt. Dan Bullock.

Bullock, of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, was 14 years old when he altered his birth certificate to get himself a one-way ticket to Vietnam, where he was killed. He’s the youngest known serviceman to die for this country since World War I – when the ages of those killed in the military were first recorded.

MacArthur, a former Brooklynite, feels he was instrumental in Bullock’s death because he carried the boy through boot camp.

“I remember somebody telling me that if I didn’t help him through boot camp, he would be alive today,” said MacArthur, a correction officer who now lives in New Jersey.

Through the nonprofit PFC Dan Bullock Foundation, MacArthur is trying to raise money to erect a life-size statue of Bullock in Brooklyn. He’s campaigning to have the president award Bullock the Medal of Honor, get him on a stamp or do anything just to let this country know who the young black man was.

“Blacks seem to always get bad press, but Bullock was the most patriotic person I have ever known,” MacArthur said.

“From the time he entered boot camp to the time they actually started shooting at him, he could have told them numerous times that he was too young, and they would have booted him out.”

Bullock entered the Marine Corps boot camp on Sept. 18, 1968, after taking his altered birth certificate to a recruiting station at Albee Square in downtown Brooklyn.

“In boot camp, he was large and strong for his age, but he had trouble keeping up whenever we ran,” MacArthur said.

The drill instructor would constantly punish the entire platoon whenever Bullock lagged behind, prompting “a couple of white guys from Georgia to get mad and plan a blanket party.”

MacArthur managed to stop the party – in which a Marine recruit would be pinned down on his bunk with a bed sheet and beaten.

MacArthur enlisted the help of other New York-area recruits to literally carry Bullock through boot camp exercises whenever he lagged behind.

Bullock, who survived eight months of boot camp, was blown to bits at the age of 15, three weeks after arriving in the war zone, while helping to defend a combat base near Da Nang.

“No one knew, even the people close to him,” Piscitelli said. “We sensed there was something wrong with him, but he didn’t look like a kid.”

Piscitelli, who was wounded three times during the war and became a sculptor in order to deal with posttraumatic stress, got involved with the foundation after reading a story about Bullock in a Vietnam veterans newsletter.

Piscitelli cast a 3-foot bronze statue of Bullock in an effort to help MacArthur raise money for the project. The Paterson, N.J., native thinks the U.S. government is embarrassed to recognize Bullock because it shows the lax recruitment procedures that existed during the war.

MacArthur got the idea of starting the foundation in 1996, after visiting the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington and realizing that Bullock was more than another name on the wall. That’s when he decided to launch his campaign.

MacArthur’s task has not been easy. He’s called everyone, including some Brooklyn politicians who specialize in breaking promises to help.

In a time when this city seems wrapped up with some guy named Richard who survived on a desert island eating rats for money, MacArthur wants us to know the name of PFC Dan Bullock, who didn’t survive.

“To me,” he said, “there is no sacrifice greater than someone laying down their life for their country.”